Customer Reviews

Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud

5 star:		(23)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

An absolutely amazing book. It has illuminated so many cause and effect chains for me that I can hardly believe how much I've learnt in such a short time. If history at school could be presented from this angle, it would fundamentally increase the general understanding of who, what and where we are.

Watson is a great writer that conveys an incredible amount of information with a story teller's flair. Quite an investment in time, worth every second.

This is a fantastic book that covers how ideas have developed through History and explains a lot of things about ourselves, members of the Western world in the 21st century.

If you are like me, you didn't enjoy your History classes much when they were all about the particular (and too often unrelated) dates of political and military events. Fortunately, brilliant historians such as Peter Watson know how to weave countless facts into an engaging history, from Gilgamesh to the Cavendish Laboratory at the dawn of the 20th century.

Don't you know what Gilgamesh is? Maybe you should take a look at this book and enjoy yourself learning and thinking about things you might have taken for granted and never questioned.

This book is highly recommended for those who, keeping an open mind, want to be aware of how humans have evolved through History and would like to get to the roots of our many habits and traditions.

I wish all educated people could enjoy the insightful comments and innumerable associations of ideas that Peter Watson shares with us in his delightful history of ideas.

Maybe the most encompassing book on History ever written. Certainly the best I have ever read. A book on History from a different perspective.

This is the history book I've always wanted to read, not a history of war but a history of ideas. A look at the index gives you an inkling of what's in store for the fortunate reader. It's size is a bit intimidating, but the scope and depth of the material demands it.
I thought the NY Times interview [panned by 'Texan' below] was inciteful and funny. To rate a book you clearly haven't read based on a reply in an interview is to deliberately mislead the literate people who would enjoy this book. Please ignore Texan's "review", and do read this book.

This is a splendid book. People who did not have a chance to go to university will find, after reading it, that -- if they couldn't before -- they can now hold their end up in a conversation with any history or social science major. Indeed, if they pay close attention to what they read here, they can probably dominate the conversation!

But if you did go to university, here is the chance to (1) fill in all the gaps, those courses you didn't have time to take or slept through, and/or (2) if you are "of a certain age" catch up with what's been happening in your field (and others) since you graduated.

Mark Steyn had a column recently in which he attacked the author for saying that monotheistic religion had been a bad idea, historically. Be that as it may, this is a splendid book, and my only question is: how the devil did the man find time to write it? Or did he have a mulit-disciplinary army of graduate students reading hundreds of books and summarizing them?

If I only bought one book this year, this would be it.

Ideas, A History of Thought and Invention from Fire to Freud is an amazing book. Peter Watson knows his brief and can explain some of the most difficult ideas ever conceived by man in words that make them understandable to the popular reader. No, he makes them more than understandable - he makes them fascinating and relevant, showing how they have shaped the fabric of human life to this very day.

Watson's capacity to discuss some of the key controversies of modern science in an even-handed manner is almost as impressive as his scholarship. Nonetheless, it is worth pointing out that it is impossible to publish a book of this scope that will not be out of date in some respects within months. The artifacts reflecting python worship 70,000 years ago in Botswana and found by Sheila Coulson from the University of Oslo, for instance, is strong support for the view that abstract thought emerged gradually in Africa and at a far earlier date than those arguing for a genetic change in European Homo sapiens 40,000 year ago. Nor, perhaps, may the discovery of Homo floresiensis face us with the challenges of explaining how a different human species with such a small brain reached the Indonesian island where their skeletons were found.

It is a surprise that a book about the power of ideas throughout human history should close suggesting that there is probably no such thing as the Platonic "inner self." While discoveries of modern neuroscience are making this an increasingly respectable position to argue, Watson's defense of his view is surprisingly poor.

Despite its riveting interest, actually reading this book is a challenge. Its 822 8x10" pages weigh over 8 pounds, which makes cumbersome bedside reading. The Big Bang to Now: A Time Line, the slim volume by T. H. Sissons, covers much of the same ground as Watson's book but in far less detail. For those not sure they are ready for a heavyweight like Watson or for anyone looking for a quick overview alongside Watson's estimable tome, The Big Bang to Now may be either a good starter or accompaniment.

Do you want to know everything about history but just don't have the time to read all the classics and the right "must read" novels and written works from Plato to Darwin (or perhaps like me you dont have the trained intellect to digest a lot of these works)? This book is the solution. It satisfied my massive curiousity of all ideas of man from the hunter gatherers through to Freud, and the best part was that it was an absolute joy to read. A two fold joy in that it is not overtly taxing due to Watson's ability to put ideas (and their context) forward in the most succinct fashion, and secondly the sheer scope of this book consistently amazed me. So many things I didn't know which have had such an important effect on mankind, and so many of the myths now explained. I read this book over the space of about 8 months. As I work full time and with a small child I dont get all the reading time I would like, but I found I also needed some time after reading a few chapters to absorb the enormity of some of the information contained therein. I was compelled to write this review after reading one of the final chapters (on Darwin's evolution) and I had the sensation of my mind literally expanding!! If you have a thirst for knowledge of the history of mankind and its ideas I can offer you no better reading, and as a supremely added bonus it is an absolute pleasure. I have only three chapters to go and I am already worrying myself as to what will take its place once I have finished it! Thank you Mr Watson you have increased my understanding of man exponentially. I look forward to your next publication.

One must give Peter Watson credit where credit is due; he is not shy when it comes to examining topics of enormous scope, or at the very least craft titles that imply that this is his aim. Unfortunately, far from examining thought "from fire to Freud" Watson's work is of far more limited dimension, instead examining European cultural evolution from the early Middle Ages forward. His text examines several topics to understand their influence and development on civilization. His examination, however, proves too often limited, failing to look far enough to embrace the full range of his field. Most disappointing is his tendency to bifurcate ideas into two competing camps, and ignore the vast nuance in the middle.

For example, Watson divides thought into two opposing spheres : the physical (scientific or natural) world and the spiritual (religious). While it is true that this dichotomy exists in the West -- interestingly forced on the physical camp by the Church - far from inevitable, the division is a historical artifact created by social context. Those enchanted by Watson, and they are legion, will retort that his is not interested in the possible, but the actual, and even then only what occurred in (western) Europe. Yet even here, Watson ignores alternatives. Judaism, which Watson gives only so much attention as suits his goals, long embraced a notion of the co-existance and even integration of these two concepts. Many rabbis examined the physical world and sacred texts and sought reinterpretation of the former when they conflicted with the latter (two prime examples being Nachmanidies of Spain and Maimonidies of Egypt, two of the most significant sages of Jewish history). Watson might likewise have considered the ancient Greeks like Aristotle who sought to understand the spiritual through they physical.

When it comes to certain concepts Watson plainly tortures his topic to reach desired conclusions. Thus he imagines Freud's examination of the unconscious as on the continuum of the notion of the soul, yet this is at best forced. While it is true that Freud postulated a division between mind and body - not surprising given the technology available to him - but far from a notion of rote ritual, he developed a theory based on observation and imagined it being refined over time by experimentation. Even a cursory comparison of this with religion reveals the extreme limits of the comparison.

This brings us to the place where Watson succeeds, and in my opinion shines. His examination of the notion of the controlled experiment, that instead of being limited to observations as they occur people can create things to observe in order to test hypothesis, is nothing short of brilliant. This concept may be the driving force of the creation of modern science, a concept that allowed humanity to tame the atom and journey to the stars. Despite its other short comings, this makes Watson's book worth reading and presents an idea worthy of further consideration.

If you want to understand the important ideas which have marked the development of mankind, read this book. From paleolithic and neolithic times, Watson tells us about the rise of language, the concept of deity, of cities, the domestication of plants and animals, romanticism, the factory, nationalism, the university, and many others. The writing is lucid. The book ends at 1900, where his other history, THE MODERN MIND, begins. IDEAS has 746 pages of text plus notes and references. I rarely feel this way about long books, but I wished it had been longer. OUTSTANDING!

Given that all the reviewers to date have given this a perfect 5 stars, I must say that I agree with minor qualification, yet not enough to lower this to 4 stars. Anyone with the hubristic ambition to survey the best (and a bit of the worst) that has been thought by a few and known by some if not many deserves acclaim for what seems to me what must have been most of a life's work! Watson keeps an amazingly even-handed control for the vast stretches he covers, and the book, although a careful reader can glimpse his own preferences within the history of ideas, does prove arguably open-minded to the forces that seek, as the book gains momentum, to shut down individual conscience and personal liberty in the service of protecting a cause, a deity, or a system.

He reminds us how thin is our civilized veneer. Iconoclasts in early medieval Byzantium nearly obliterated the beauties of earlier Christian art. Prejudice and stupidity prove powerful eradicators of goodness and beauty. "That certain works of Cicero should survive in one copy, and that under the layer of a palimpsest, emphasises how fragile civilisation is." (257) The failure of Christianity to stem modernity is shown much later in the ant-modernist papal campaigns of the 19c to be rooted in a very Christian assertion of individual conscience above dictatorial authority. The success of Islam today, contrarily, he explains, lies in its success in the 19c to combat its own secularizing and liberalizing dissidents. So, he provocatively muses, which faith is in healthier shape today?

Such startling juxtapositions characterize this book. So affordable, and a wealth of a liberal education for an infinitesimal fraction of college tuition. This book taught me far more than decades of on-and-off reading ever has or ever could about how ideas and people and events build and connect and clash. By the way, only a couple of superficial errors marred the entire text, an amazing feat considering the amount of data amassed. It took me over a month to read, and each chapter (36 plus intro and conclusion) a substantial part of an evening, but what reward for so little of my own labor.

My own favorites among hundreds of those introduced were Alex Ferguson, a skeptical philosopher from the Scottish Enlightenment who denied we can advance very far at all through our historical treadmill; Robert Owen, the proto-socialist and radical British advocate for labor rights and secular inquiry; Max Weber's separation into knowledge by personal religious or spriritual experience vs. science and technological progress able to be shared by us all; William James' pragmatism; and Karl Marx if only for his pithy quote that sums up his concept of alienation so well: workers have no control over their conditions or their product, and 'are forced to operate "well within their capabilities."' (567) [His earlier book examined the 20c separately; "Ideas" stops around 1900.] Watson shows his own bias, I suppose, in favor of the liberal stance and the challenging rejoinder over the conservative posture and the defensive pose, but what reader would not want this-- for it shows a quick and generous human mind grappling with the same weighty ideas we must as we follow Watson's lead-- in favor of an inert summary of names and dates?

You may expect from my quick picks that the bulk of the book is thus given over to early modern history and ideas, but these concepts serve more as the capstone which is supported by centuries of earlier thinkers. While he does seem to whirl past much in medieval times, the comparative paucity of extant information compared to more recent times does make this pace understandable. The book does build upon earlier ideas, and the ideas of course gain heft as centuries follow one another and later thinkers learn from and contend against one another. Watson sums up the three most influential ideas in our common historical inheritance: the soul, the idea of Europe, and the experiment. These do not assume the Plato-Charlemagne-Newton sort of trichotomy that you might think; nor is the narrative so neatly divided.

The concluding chapter shows how these ideas all meshed around the later 19th c and pressures of Marx, Freud (both are shown in contemporary perspective for their failures as well as accurate observations; Freud's negative reputation among many today I found eye-opening and arguably far too little popularized!) and above all Darwin. The break of the outside, verifiable, quantifiable, and accessible realm with the inner, transient, insubstantial, and perhaps perpetually inaccessible mind-soul-spirit serves as this book's climactic assertion. He argues that Aristotle, in effect, is to be chosen over Plato. Watson closes by backing those who would side with observing from our human window the actions of the zoo rather than those of the monastery. That is, he turns us back after 740 pp. to our dim and irretrievable origins far more ancient than the oldest artifacts recorded here. He doubts that we can grasp whatever swirls about inside of ourselves, and he seems to deny any ultimate attainment of knowledge about what lies beneath our surface. Like his scientific and rational and secular forebears, the triumph of modern man, Watson seems to agree, lies in how we connect on the exterior to one another, for only there can we all agree to common connections and attain shared satisfactions.

Riveting! Quite frankly this book puts EVERYTHING in context. The scale, depth and range of this work is mesmerizing. To chronologically review and assess the importance and origin and inspiration and impact of ideas (wherever geographically they may have originated) is a task one wouldn't think was possible. But Peter Watson weaves this multi-dimensional tapestry so comprehensively and clearly a reader might almost feel the exalted rank of the "universal man" was within their grasp.